


prolonged periods of abnormally hot weather

by gandalfspace



Category: Organization for Transformative Works RPF
Genre: AO3 is Trying Its Best, Crack, Gen, all hail the sysadmins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:55:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28590627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gandalfspace/pseuds/gandalfspace
Summary: The Absolutely True Story Of How AO3 Went Down For Several Hours In The Early Morning Of Tuesday, 5th January 2021.
Relationships: Archive of Our Own (Anthropomorphic) & james_ (Fandom RPF)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	prolonged periods of abnormally hot weather

**Author's Note:**

> The cross stitch was designed, created and photographed by BabelGhoti and for those who cannot see the image it is a white cross stitch with dark red (the ao3 red) writing. In curly cursive it says "extremely unrepentantly" and then in all caps Cooper Black chunky serif it says "EVIL", with a superscript "AO3" after it reminiscent of a little TM symbol. 
> 
> The premise is all Sammie, I just made it a fic. And to be clear: no weather events caused the downtime. No, not even that one. Also, happy belated birthday to James's wife!

AO3 hadn't been this excited since its first Yuletide.

It had been a rough year for everyone, AO3 not excepted. The loss of its dear friends from China who had shared with them so enthusiastically and with so much joy and gratitude had really cast a pall over February, which was closely followed by the beginning of the pandemic. At first, AO3 had been excited! While obviously the pandemic itself was terrible and it felt for its users who were suffering, there were more people commenting, kudosing and posting fic since everyone was trapped in quarantine — and that had cheered AO3 up a bit. But then… well, then it began to get overwhelming. Sometimes there was too much of a good thing, and AO3 had to set up a system where it gently and temporarily placed users in jail for kicking the servers like the football. Thankfully, most people were polite enough never to kick the servers like the football, but that band of rascals known as tag wranglers did it enthusiastically and often, as wranglers did so many other things.

(Wranglers weren’t rascals, AO3 knew. They performed a very important service for its users, and AO3 loved living vicariously through them as they crowed with joy about a long overdue new canonical populating with a whopping sixty-nine works. It was, one might say, nice.)

Anyway, the point was that it sure had been a year that happened, and AO3 had no idea what 2021 would bring. It did know, however, that today was an incredibly important day: it was James’s wife’s birthday. James, of course, was AO3’s dad. AO3 had many parents, some of whom still took the time to clean AO3’s room or sing to it when it was sick or make it beautiful with up-to-date documentation in dozens of languages, and some of whom had moved away, perhaps writing to AO3 occasionally. AO3 loved them all equally, because that’s what one did with parents, but if pressed AO3 would admit a special fondness for James. He just had… a knack. When AO3 was sick or injured or simply unspeakably frustrated because _something_ wasn’t working correctly and AO3 didn’t know what to do to fix it, James came to the rescue. Whether in the depths of winter or in the heat of summer, James could always find the solution.

AO3 knew that humans often found it a meaningful gesture for someone to treat their significant other kindly, and had read many instances in the fics posted on it that it was customary to give your close friend’s spouse a birthday present. It had also been led to believe through the perusal of many fics that humans enjoyed surprises, so its plan was simple: it would turn up at Mrs James’s birthday dinner as a surprise, and give her a beautiful cross stitch that AO3 had been working on:

There was one small problem: AO3 wasn’t entirely sure what time James’s wife’s birthday dinner was happening. Also, AO3 was confused frequently by timezones, particularly the international date line, so it figured it was better to be safe than sorry and decided to set out much earlier than it technically needed to in order to attend the dinner. Maybe it could help James set up! That would be useful! Humans enjoyed when other people were useful.

Just before AO3 left, it heard some sort of commotion out the front. It was the happy sort of commotion, though, the one that meant that humans were reading and enjoying a particularly delightful fic, so it paid it no mind as it proceeded to turn off all the lights in preparation for departure. The commotion changed in tone, grew at first desperate, then distressed.

“AO3!” someone said, except that it was really more several hundred (thousand?) someones. “AO3, where did you go? It’s all dark! Ugh, it’s not my internet, I’m loading other pages fine — did the author delete the chapter, you think? I knew I should’ve saved it as soon as it went up — it’s the whole site, the entire thing is down, how do I get to the Support form — oh is it loading? It looks like it’s load— no that’s just the 400 error again. AO3!!!”

AO3 had not paid attention to where the voices were coming from but suddenly they were right in front of it. “AO3! Excuse me, we have some very important things to do. Namely, our favourite author updated our favourite fic and we have to read Chapter 10 immediately. We actually came to you specifically to read it! We’d heard it was super good but we needed an account to read it, so… here we are! I’m not sure why you’re not working, but you could possibly… start working again?”

AO3 shook its head, gesturing to the cross stitch, which may have possibly given the wrong message to the hopeful people standing in front of it. “Sorry, I’ve got places to be.”


End file.
